Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Yesterday I added an assortment of PSA-graded regional, insert, and oddball football cards to my sales site, including 1960 Bell Brand Rams, 1960 Mayrose Cardinals, 1961 Lake to Lake Packers, 1961 Nu-Card, 1968 Topps Stand-Up, 1970 Topps Super Glossy, and 1970 Kellogg’s 3-D. Shown here are a couple of the Mayrose Cardinals cards, Woodley Lewis and King Hill, both wearing number 17. Hill appears to have been the real number 17, since Lewis’s other cards with the Cardinals show him in number 20. Hill’s 1959 Topps card also has him in number 17.

There are eleven cards in the complete Mayrose Cardinals set. They were distributed in the St. Louis region in packages of Mayrose franks and bacon. 1960, the year the cards were issued, was the year that the Cardinals moved to St. Louis from Chicago. Mayrose brand lunchmeats are still produced by Armour-Ekrich Meats, but to my knowledge they haven’t included cards since 1960.

Yesterday I put a nice group of PSA-graded 1940′s and 1950′s football cards up for sale, including a nice collection of 1959 Bell Brand Rams cards. One of them is this Sid Gillman pre-rookie card. PSA has graded only seven examples of this card so far: one PSA 9OC, three PSA 7′s, and three with lower grades.

Yesterday I added a nice group of PSA-graded 1955 Bowman cards to nearmintcards.com, including this Billy Wilson rookie card. Wilson died earler this year.

There is a good argument that Wilson should be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He led the league in receptions three times in the 50′s. He was a Pro Bowler six straight years. When he retired, he was second only to Don Hutson in career receptions. And his career statistics are comparable to those of Tom Fears and Elroy Hirsch, who are members of the Hall of Fame.

You can see all of Billy Wilson’s cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

Happy Earth Day!

I wouldn’t say I’m a fanatic, but I do try to reuse and recycle whatever I can. My wife and I have a compost bin, we use cloth shopping bags, and we reuse plastic bags until they fall apart or have dog poop in them–whichever comes first.

In my business I also try to reuse as much as possible. I am happy to say that in my ten years of selling cards, I have never bought a box, bubble wrap, or packing peanuts. I get plenty of those in the mail, and as long as they’re clean, I reuse them. I ask my friends for their bubble wrap and foam wrap, too. They wonder what fun they’re missing.

My wife and I get way too many packing peanuts to reuse, so we bag the excess peanuts and take them to the UPS Store, where the clerks reuse them. My last load was eight or ten garbage bags full. Some eBay sellers, I’ve noticed, use peanuts made from corn starch, and those dissolve when they get wet–much more Earth-friendly than the styrofoam peanuts.

I do buy one type of packaging new, and that’s bubble envelopes. From eBay sellers I sometimes get cards in bubble envelopes with six layers of labels on them, and I think that’s great. As long as the cards make it safely, I don’t care what the envelope looks like. I do this as a business, though, and I need to maintain a reasonably professional appearance. So I compromise: I use a shiny new bubble envelope for the outside, and on the inside layer I wrap the cards in bubble wrap or a cut-up used bubble envelope. This works well for one to three cards, and for more cards than that I use a (used) box.

A recent cover of Sports Collectors Digest, headlined Pretty in Pink, pictured a group of 1959 Topps football cards with pink backgrounds. Great cover, I thought, and it reminded me of the 1961 Topps cards of the Houston Oilers. On all but one of the Oilers cards in that set, the player is shown in a pink jersey.

As far as I know, the Oilers wore only the light blue jerseys shown on their 1961 Fleer cards. Topps evidently airbrushed the blue jerseys pink, but why? Topps headquarters is in New York City, and the New York Titans finished second to the Oilers in the AFL East in 1960. Might a Topps employee have colored the Oilers pink to exact a bit of revenge for his team?

The 1964 Philadelphia set includes a Play of the Year card for each team. Looking at some of those cards this week, I noticed that the Lions’ Play of the Year was pretty lame. Their play of the year went for only 10 yards?

Looking through the rest of the cards, I found that the other teams’ plays were also unimpressive. The Eagles’ play of the year was a 12-yard pass from Norm Snead to Bobby Mitchell. The Colts’ play of the year was a screen from Johnny Unitas to Jerry Hill that netted 15 yards. The Packers’ play of the year, a run by Tom Moore, was also for 15 yards, but it at least went for a touchdown.

Perhaps the plays came in critical situations or were the teams’ bread-and-butter plays throughout the year. There’s no indication of that on the cards, though. My guess is that because the cards were oriented horizontally, there wasn’t room for diagrams of long plays, so the card designers picked short plays instead.

Yesterday I put another nice batch of graded 1960′s football cards up for sale. The group includes 1964 Philadelphia cards of Don Meredith and Bart Starr, who would face off in the 1966 and 1967 NFL championship games. The 1967 championship, which was played in Green Bay in -13 degree weather, is better known as the Ice Bowl.

The Ice Bowl is actually the first football game I remember from when I was a kid. I grew up near Green Bay, and the game, because it was a home game, was blacked out on the Green Bay stations. My dad and his friends wanted to watch the game, so they drove to a bar that could pick up the Wausau TV station that carried the game. I tagged along, but I ended up going off and playing with the bar owner’s kid instead of watching.

In the dark days before eBay, there was a telephone auction called Teletrade. You could send your cards to Teletrade, they would grade the cards and sell them in their automated phone auction, and they would send you a check for the proceeds. Teletrade is still in business, but their auctions now appear to be limited to coins and currency.

I bought a lot of cards through Teletrade, including some I should have passed on. I found these yesterday in a box of junk cards: ten 1978 Topps Joe Klecko rookie cards, still with the Teletrade seal on them. What was I thinking, that Joe would be a hall-of-famer some day? That I could find his mom and she would pay big bucks for them? Or did I hit the wrong key on my phone, meaning to bid on a John Unitas rookie card instead? Most likely I just wanted to bid on something, and there wasn’t anything I was interested in buying that week.

So what are they worth now? There are loads of them on eBay at around a dollar each. But those, of course, don’t have the genuine Teletrade seal.

Mine are up for auction, too. Click here if you love Joe Klecko!